Publisher's Synopsis
Many experimental psychologists carry out research on hearing and speech, yet only rarely is their work reported in the Quarterly Journal. This Special Issue seeks to redress the imbalance. It contains nineteen papers contributed by scientists working in Britain, the U.S.A., and The Netherlands. The papers were among those submitted in response to a call for papers and were subjected to the Journal's usual process of peer review. Seventeen papers report new perceptual data. They cover a wide range of topical issues in speech perception and psychoacoustics including: profile analysis, comodulation masking release, and across-channel masking of modulated signals; adaptation, detection, and lateralization; frequency selectivity and the perception of loudness in listeners with impaired hearing; the analysis of cues to phonetic categories by listeners with normal hearing and by patients with cochlear implants; phonemic restoration; second-language learning; the role of resolved harmonics in specifying formant frequencies; audio?visual speech perception; and prosodic cues issued by talkers when correcting errors in speech production. Finally, two papers describe new models of auditory and perceptual processes: one is a mathematical account of audio-visual integration in speech perception; the other is a computational model of auditory stream segregation. Most of the papers are relatively short and have been written in a style that should make them accessible to a wide readership.
